I got the phone yesterday. While I've used iOS and Android this is my first actual smartphone. Thus far, I'm impressed with the hardware, I find the OS to be mostly trouble-free and very slick, and AT&T has been good to me and fast thus far. While I'm still playing, I have a few immediate questions I can't seem to find the answers to:

My phone currently says "4G". Does anyone know if this will differentiate between the HSPA+ and the enhanced 3G "backhaul" connection or will it just list it all as "4G." Ditto for LTE, if I ever went into an LTE area?

How does the auto-brightness feature typically work?

Do I really have to be paranoid about fully discharging the battery before charging, and those scary "car chargers will ruin your phone" stories?

As a side note about AT&T I thought I'd share, they offered to do insurance for $10/month. I thought about it as I tend to be pretty rough on phones, but it was still a $125 deductible. I figured I could find a cheap used eBay one if I ever needed a replacement hopefully in a year+.

My phone currently says "4G". Does anyone know if this will differentiate between the HSPA+ and the enhanced 3G "backhaul" connection or will it just list it all as "4G." Ditto for LTE, if I ever went into an LTE area?

I've seen LTE and 4G so far. Can't say I haven't been far enough from civilization in the past 72 hours to see 3G/E.

dashbarron wrote:

How does the auto-brightness feature typically work?

Light sensor. The brighter the room, the brighter the screen.

dashbarron wrote:

Do I really have to be paranoid about fully discharging the battery before charging, and those scary "car chargers will ruin your phone" stories?

Do you mean battery memory? I thought that hasn't been an issue with good quality batteries in a while.

IPS vs SAMOLED. I suppose the less color saturation is better, but the blacks were BLACK on the samoled.

No more Zune sync. In fact syncing using the WP8 app is pants on head bass ackwards. I feel like I'm using WinMo and Activesync. I suppose there's the WMP workaround, and drag and drop, but dammit I've been using Zune since 2006.

I'll bow to no51 who seems to know more about this stuff--and thanks for the info.

Unless it's just me, I found the menu bar at the top to not always appear upon tap. I haven't quite figured out the right combination and it usually takes a few seconds to get it to display.

I just assumed battery memory was still an issue. One of my largest concerns about a smartphone is the poor battery life--I'm used to plugging in once every 5 days or so. The userguide only says not to leave it plugged in after it's fully charged--or else it could diminish capacity. They also tell you not to spill water on the phone...so...grain of salt. Side note: I unplugged the phone about 7:30 this morning and I've used it with Wi-fi and 4G on, light web browsing and app usage, a few texts, I had earphones plugged in and played music for 2hours~ while traveling, and I generally have been fiddling with it every 15-20 minutes all day. It's about 15hours~ later and the Battery Level app is reporting 52%. I'm going to see if I can squeak through until late tomorrow night with the same usage during the day (this would be about a 36hour~ period).

chµck wrote:

Post camera samples!

From what I understand...the videos on the Lumia are really good, and so are the night photos, but daytime photos lack compared to the competition. Irregardless, here's a photo I just took in a completely black room, + 3 monitors giving off some residual light. I took this with the factory settings on the camera (I don't really understand exposure settings), and I uploaded it uncompressed to ImageShack http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/82 ... 11002.jpg/

IPS vs SAMOLED. I suppose the less color saturation is better, but the blacks were BLACK on the samoled.

No more Zune sync. In fact syncing using the WP8 app is pants on head bass ackwards. I feel like I'm using WinMo and Activesync. I suppose there's the WMP workaround, and drag and drop, but dammit I've been using Zune since 2006.

I sort of miss the gutter.

Hate the XBox branding on music+videos. Bring back Zune.

The only syncing I've done was with the WindowsPhone app for the PC. It managed to sync most of my songs from my iTunes playlists but it keeps crashing somewhere late on the import process. Oh, and once I logged into my Live account it did sync my mail and OneNote notes, which was pretty swanky.

The XBox branding fetish over the last few years has been really annoying, agreed.

The phone is much bigger than I expected, for some reason. This makes it a little awkward to thumb text with one hand, unless you have larger hands. The buttons on the side are also a bit stiff, making a quick and fluid activate/unlock motion with the phone unattainable most of the time, at least for me and until I get used to it (I hope).

From what I understand...the videos on the Lumia are really good, and so are the night photos, but daytime photos lack compared to the competition. Irregardless, here's a photo I just took in a completely black room, + 3 monitors giving off some residual light. I took this with the factory settings on the camera (I don't really understand exposure settings), and I uploaded it uncompressed to ImageShack http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/822/wp20121111002.

Pretty good image quality, but come on, man, no need to use the Ad-infested imageshack! www.imgur.com works much better for sharing

My subscription allows you people to exist on this site and makes me a better human being than you'll ever be

Oh no you didn't. You are so lucky I put my bike away for the winter yesterday!

JohnC wrote:

dashbarron wrote:

Pretty good image quality, but come on, man, no need to use the Ad-infested imageshack! http://www.imgur.com works much better for sharing

Imageshack is an old habit. I don't really post pictures to forums that much lol.

Battery TestSo I've gone through my first fully charged battery. I unplugged it Sunday morning about 7:30a.m. and it's about 9:00p.m. on Monday. 37.5 hours~ later and my phone is reporting 12% battery. Here's the settings I've used and my first battery's biography:

Overall, I would consider my usage light-medium

NFC is turned on

4G Cellular turned on (and always in 4G as far as I can tell)

Wireless turned on (but not necessarily always connected)

Battery saver turned off

Brightness set to low

Downloading about a dozen apps

Small amounts of web surfing and app use.

Took a few pictures, processed a panaroma shot, uploaded and emailed a few, and played with the flash-as-a-flashlight a few times

About a dozen texts

Two brief (less than 5 minutes) phone calls

Traveling for 2 hours, playing music through the earphones at around 5-7 volume level (preferred transportation, no51....)

Fiddling with it every 15-30 minutes just to fiddle

For some side notes: I find the contact list confusing, or the lack thereof. It's integrated into the calling, messaging, and people apps, and while the automatic importing from Hotmail/Facebook (which can be turned on/off) is great, I'm a little bit confused on how it decides to link multiple profiles (or why it decides it wont), why it chooses to import some emails from Hotmail, and how the entire contact list is organized. It just seems messy.

And then Nokia, AT&T, and Windows have their own set of apps, sometimes duplicates of the same thing preinstalled, which is initially confusing (though uninstallable).

Different functions and settings aren't where I inheritanly think they should be, and I have to hunt around a bit more. Maybe this is just me needing to get used to the phone.

Batter is at 11%. I'm assuming I could make it to the morning which would be a full 2 days worth of battery. I'm really hoping morphine makes a battery pack for this thing, and it's not grossly awkward installed.

Last edited by dashbarron on Mon Nov 12, 2012 9:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Oh no you didn't. You are so lucky I put my bike away for the winter yesterday!

I'm not officially putting my bike into storage until there's salt on the roads

dashbarron wrote:

For some side notes: I find the contact list confusing, or the lack thereof. It's integrated into the calling and messaging apps, and while the automatic importing from Hotmail/Facebook (which can be turned on/off) is great, I'm a little bit confused on how it decides to link multiple profiles (or why it decides it wont), and how the entire contact list is organized. It just seems messy.

The People tile is the contact list. You can link multiple users using the 'link' button when looking at their contact info. I think the most I have linked to one person is 5; they have a couple twitter accounts, facebook, linkedin and my regular address book. My complaint about this one is that the link suggestions seem dumber than in 7.5. I have a couple friends who use their formal names in facebook, but I use their short names in my address book (Matt vs Matthew, Phil vs Phillip) and it doesn't seem to link it.

dashbarron wrote:

And then Nokia, AT&T, and Windows have their own set of apps, sometimes duplicates of the same thing preinstalled, which is initially confusing (though uninstallable).

The AT&T apps are garbage. I uninstalled them right away. The Nokia ones on the other hand, look promising.

The lack of Zune sync is seriously killing me on this phone. All Microsoft had to do was change the logo from the Z to X, and maybe change the background to some kind of tint of green. That's all they had to do. But no, Xbox Music had to be a Win8 exclusive and for 7 (and earlier) users, there's this Windows Phone Sync crApp. At times it seems that they based WP8 on WP7 and not WP7.5. The locked screen behavior when playing music is a prime example of this. In 7.5 the 'now playing' overlay is transparent, but in 8 (like in 7) that is a gray bar. At times I wonder how in the world could anybody mess up like this; then I remember: Oh yeah, this is typical Microsoft.

Re: battery life, I'm getting ~4 days on a charge with light usage (data and wifi turned off unless I want to check my email or the weather, which I do a couple times a day). I do stream music to my car over BT when driving, though.

Mind if I ask some questions?

1. MTP mode.I've read that the 920 shows up as removable storage when plugged into a PC. Can you transfer any type of file or are you limited to pictures/movies/music?

2. Bluetooth file transfer.Is this implemented?

3. Camera.I've read some reviews complaining about softness in bright light? Care to comment? Many smartphones oversharpen their images anyway, so I'm wondering if this is the problem (nokia tends to be light on postprocessing so you can manipulate the images later with more fidelity). Is this what you're commenting on about daytime photos?

I realized I didn't clarify well on the contact list, but I think we're coming from the same place. The linking seems messy with nicknames, full names, screen names, and email addresses--I was getting some weird error about not linking various accounts for some reason I don't recall. I spent a good 30 minutes last night tediously entering in phone numbers on my contacts from my old phone where I have about 35% of the LCD left, and all the Facebook profiles (even though I had email/skype contacts for these same people) just required notecards, whatever the hell those exactly are. Luckily, M$ synced this with all my other services, which was my first initial yippie response when logging into my Live account. And I feel vindicated after taking flak from people for still using Hotmail after all these years

So Zune Sync just...syncs music? I'm going to be anal because I don't understand it. What's preventing you from importing the music via a different method like Control C and Ving?

Also, have you got a wireless charging plate? If so, how's it working out for you (speed, connectivity)? Mine's still awaiting shipment from the factory; I've got a feeling this is going to be one of those 4 week deals.

Voldenuit wrote:

1. MTP mode.I've read that the 920 shows up as removable storage when plugged into a PC. Can you transfer any type of file or are you limited to pictures/movies/music?

Anything you want. It first shows up in Windows under devices and printers for some reason, because we all know how useless that is (though it does point you to the Windows Phone App for transferring files). But it also list the phone as a removable 29.1GB harddrive which is segregated by 5 folders: documents, music, pictures, ringtones, and videos. You can swap in the appropriate file types into those folders and access it via your phone: I threw a document into the document folder and edited it 10 seconds later on my phone--oddly enough, it wouldn't let me delete the document that was in the document folder because of permissions error even though I didn't have it currently open; everything outside the folders I could delete.

You can use the rest of the harddrive to store whatever you want but it doesn't seem like the phone can access it, and unlike Android there's no file manager, unless someone makes the app, if it is even possible. As a side note, I couldn't open documents that weren't in the document folder.

Voldenuit wrote:

2. Bluetooth file transfer.Is this implemented?

Yes!! You just made my night. I've hardly done anything Bluetooth besides a phone-car hookup. I fired up the TF101 running Android 4.0 and synced it to my Lumia via BT. I opened the document on my phone, clicked "Share," clicked the TF101, accepted on the TF101, and done. Very cool.

Nokia is making a big deal of the NFC chip being able to tap + sync, so that might be worthwhile.

Voldenuit wrote:

3. Camera.I've read some reviews complaining about softness in bright light? Care to comment? Many smartphones oversharpen their images anyway, so I'm wondering if this is the problem (nokia tends to be light on postprocessing so you can manipulate the images later with more fidelity). Is this what you're commenting on about daytime photos?

I haven't taken any daytime photos, but those are the rumors I've seen; I really don't understand photo-attributed things well. I'll try snapping some pictures tomorrow and upload them--on Imgur--and share for your review. Nokia has a few different photo apps, and at least one of them is suppose to let you do some editing of the photos (and another one to animate them?). I'm assuming that with the high-quality camera that should be in this thing, there will be or there is an app to help tweak the best visually out of them.

Sorry.

Voldenuit wrote:

4. File Manager.Is there one stock?

It doesn't look like it, no. It looks like it gives an option to rename some of those aforementioned directories but the option is grayed ou,t curiously.

Today, I've used the phone more fiendishly for everything besides games. The battery has squeaked through till midnight...but just barely. It's been about 17hours~ and probably less in heavier-use situations. But it's good to know the phone can last a solid 48hours~ if I need it too with Wi-Fi, NFC, and cellular 4G activated. I'm still keeping my eyes out for a Mophine like pack.

1. MTP mode.I've read that the 920 shows up as removable storage when plugged into a PC. Can you transfer any type of file or are you limited to pictures/movies/music?

I think so. Just tested with transferring a .rar file in there and it took it no complaints.

Voldenuit wrote:

2. Bluetooth file transfer.Is this implemented?

The internet says yes.

Voldenuit wrote:

3. Camera.I've read some reviews complaining about softness in bright light? Care to comment? Many smartphones oversharpen their images anyway, so I'm wondering if this is the problem (nokia tends to be light on postprocessing so you can manipulate the images later with more fidelity). Is this what you're commenting on about daytime photos?

I don't have any complaints about the camera. There are rumours of a firmware/software fix that has something to do with the camera. If wanted to do any serious photography though, I'll take my DSLR out.

I have to admit I'm still on the fence about the 920. If I were in the market for a new phone, it would definitely be my first choice, but I'm thinking I can keep using my existing N8 for a while longer. My contract is coming up for renewal in a year and I think I am eligible for a phone upgrade next month, but I'm not sure if I want to sign on for another 2 years of ATT (not that there are any decent carrier options in America, boo).

Just buy a large capacity "external battery pack" from Amazon or somewhere and keep it fully charged and somewhere close... It'll charge any USB device (not only your Nokia) you have, multiple times. Very useful if, for example, there's an electricity outage in your location or you're traveling somewhere where it's not easy to charge your devices very often...

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Not sure why you want to make the already large and heavy phone even more heavy and large with attachable battery sleeve, especially since the built-in battery is already good for whole day, but... whatever, it's your choice

My subscription allows you people to exist on this site and makes me a better human being than you'll ever be